Note on the Author and Editor

ELIZABETH BARRETT was born on 6 March 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, County Durham, the first of eleven children. When she was three years old the family moved to Hope End, Herefordshire. Her writing career began in earnest at the age of eleven when she began composing The Battle of Marathon; at fifteen she had published for the first time in a magazine. At this time she also began to feel the effects of an illness, and possible hypochondria, which was to recur for the rest of her life.

Her next volume of poetry, An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, was published in 1826 with the aid of family money. By this time she had a determination to turn poetry into a career. Her next volumes, Prometheus Bound (1833) and The Seraphim, and Other Poems (1838), proved to be relatively successful and led to the publication, despite long periods of illness and convalescence, of Poems (in two volumes) in 1844. In the following year she received the first of many letters from Robert Browning, whose poetry she had mentioned approvingly in ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ in Poems. In May 1845 Robert Browning made his first visit to Elizabeth Barrett and the two married secretly, against the wishes of Elizabeth’s father, on 12 September 1845. One week later they eloped clandestinely to Italy.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning then spent most of the remainder of her life in Italy, punctuated by visits to London. It was during this period that her major poetical works were written: Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and her long poem Aurora Leigh (1857). Her passionate interest in Italian nationalism, the inspiration for Casa Guidi Windows, was also apparent in the last volume published during her lifetime, Poems Before Congress (1860).

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died, after a winter of illness, in Florence on 29 June 1861. She was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Florence on 1 July 1861. In 1862 Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Last Poems, arranged by Robert Browning, were published.

COLIN GRAHAM is Lecturer in English at the University of Huddersfield. He has written on nineteenth-century poetry, Irish literature and post-colonial theory. He has edited Robert Browning, Men and Women and Other Poems (Everyman, 1993) and is currently writing An Introduction to Irish Studies.

Chronology of Barrett Browning’s Life

Year
Life

1806
Elizabeth Barrett born 6 March at Coxhoe Hall, Durham

1809
Barrett family move to Hope End, Herefordshire

1815
Elizabeth Barrett and her parents in Paris

1817
Begins writing The Battle of Marathon

1820
The Battle of Marathon printed privately. ‘Bro’ (her brother Edward) goes to Charterhouse

1821
Her poetry is published in a magazine for the first time (New Monthly Magazine)

1822
Returns to Hope End after a stay in Gloucester

1823
Holiday in France

1825
Stays with her grandmother in Hastings

1826
An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems published (25 March)

1827
Begins her correspondence with Hugh Stuart Boyd

1828
Mary Moulton-Barrett, Elizabeth’s mother, dies on 7 October

1830
Death of her paternal grandmother

1831
Keeps a diary during this year

1832
Hope End, the family home, is sold; the Barrett’s move to Sidmouth in Devon

1833
Prometheus Unbound published

1835
Barrett family move to London

1838
The Seraphim, and Other Poems published. Elizabeth goes to Torquay for a period of convalescence

1840
Edward Moulton-Barrett, Elizabeth’s brother, drowns

1841
Returns to London

1844
Poems (2 volumes) published

1845
In January Robert Browning writes his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett. Visits her first in May

1846
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning marry secretly on 12 September. They leave clandestinely for Italy one week later

1847
Brownings live in Pisa, then Florence

1848
Begins writing Casa Guidi Windows

1849
Birth of Elizabeth’s son ‘Pen’ (Robert Weidemann Browning)

1850
New edition of Poems is published

1851
The Brownings return to London for the first time since their elopement.
Casa Guidi Windows published

1852
Visits London again, staying at Paris on the return journey to Florence

1853
Begins writing Aurora Leigh

1854
Returns to Florence after travels around Italy

1855
After an illness early in the year, visits London

1856
Aurora Leigh completed

1857
Death of Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett, Elizabeth’s father. Aurora Leigh published

1858
Holidays in France

1859
Returns to Florence from Rome. Illness

1860
Poems Before Congress published. Death of her sister Henrietta

1861
Winter brings on illness while in Rome. Returns to Florence in June.
Death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning on 29 June. Buried 1 July in Protestant cemetery in Florence

Chronology of her Times

Year
Literary Context
Historical Events

1806

Grenville takes over as Prime Minister from Pitt

1807
Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes

1809
Tennyson born
Beginning of commercial boom

1812
Dickens born Robert Browning born
Napoleon enters Russia. America declares war on Britain

1813
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
East India Company abolished

1814
Wordsworth, The Excursion

1817
Death of Jane Austen
Economic slump follows boom of previous two years

1818
Keats, Endymion

1820
Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
Accession of George IV

1821
Death of Keats

1822
Matthew Arnold born Death of Shelley
Famine in Ireland

1824
Death of Byron

1825

Trades unions legalised

1827
Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar

1829

Catholic emancipation

1830
Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical
Accession of William IV. Revolutions in Europe

1832
Death of Walter Scott
First Reform Act

1833
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
Abolition of slavery in British Empire

1837
Dickens, Oliver Twist
Accession of Victoria

1838
Dickens, Nicholas Nicklcby
Anti-Corn Law League established

1841
Robert Browning, Pippa Passes

1842
Tennyson, Poems
Chartist riots

1843
Death of Southey
Wordsworth becomes Poet Laureate

1846

Corn Law abolished

1847
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

1848
Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Revolutions in Europe

1850
Death of Wordworth

1851
Ruskin, Stones of Venice
Great Exhibition

1853
Matthew Arnold, Poems

1854
Dickens, Hard Times
Crimean War begins

1855
Robert Browning, Men and Women

1856
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays
Treaty of Paris

1857
Trollope, Barchester Towers
Indian Mutiny

1859
Darwin, Origin of the Species
Construction of Suez Canal begins

1861
J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism
Prince Albert dies. Beginning of American Civil War

Introduction

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s reputation has enjoyed mixed fortunes. During her lifetime she was one of the most famous and respected intellectual figures of the Victorian era; she was even very seriously suggested as a possible candidate to be the successor as Poet Laureate to Wordsworth. For most of her life her poetry was better known and more highly regarded than that of her husband, Robert Browning. But after her death, Robert’s reputation grew, while Elizabeth was often unfavourably compared to other women poets (most usually Christina Rossetti). The fact that critical accounts of Barrett Browning were framed in these two ways (by comparisons to her husband and to other women) points towards the place from which a renewed interest in her remarkable, often startling poetry would come. It has been historians and critics of women’s literature who have, in the later twentieth century, ‘rediscovered’ the abilities and idiosyncrasies of Barrett Browning, and who have found in her poetry statements and attitudes about women and society which are in some places fascinatingly of their time, and in others profoundly ahead of their time. Reading Barrett Browning as a woman writer is not the only way to think of her work (she was gifted in the crafting and structuring of her verse; she was interested in radicalism, in European politics and in the occult), but it has proved to be an excellent way in which to begin reading Barrett Browning’s poetry again.

Elizabeth Barrett’s early life (which might even be thought of as the time before she corresponded with Robert Browning in 1845, by which time she was thirty-eight) was dominated by the presences of three men: her father (who tried to prevent her and any of his other children marrying), her brother Edward (known as ‘Bro’) and Hugh Boyd, a classical scholar who heavily influenced her reading and early intellectual development. Her devotion to these men was intense and they may be seen to represent the emotional and intellectual fetters which were to restrict, or at the very least dominate, her early poetry.

‘To My Father on His Birthday’, published in An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826) seems at first sight a reflection of this devotion, written in a classicised poetic form, and through this attempting to gain the recognition of the father. As the quotation from Horace which stands as an epigraph to this poem suggests, ‘my father was the reason for these things,’ and the poem seems to have a belief in the near-divine inspiration of the paternal.

No thoughts of fondness e’er appear
More fond, than those I write of here!
No name can e’er on tablet shine,
My father! more beloved than thine!

Yet the poem may also contain the germ of an uneasiness about the power and role of the father figure in general. The poem is replete with emphatic statements of affection, which, as the poem progresses, tend a little towards hollowness. ‘To My Father’ ends:

But still my Father’s looks remain
The best Maecenas of my strain;
My gentlest joy, upon his brow
To read the smile, that meets me now –
To hear him, in his kindness, say
The words, – perchance he’ll speak today!

The final couplet is awkward, reading almost like parody, while stressing the importance of the father’s speech and language for the poetry of his daughter. The ‘strain’ here may have a double edge and it is tempting to read this as a foreshadowing of Aurora Leigh (whose education is consciously set out in her father’s as opposed to her mother’s ‘tongue’) discovering her father’s library:

Books! Books! Books!
I had found the secret of the garret-room
Piled high with cases in my father’s name,
Piled high, packed large …
(Aurora Leigh, First Book (see extracts from
Aurora Leigh below, line 228 ff))

By the time of Aurora Leigh Barrett Browning was registering a much more conscious recognition that it is the ‘father’s name’, in the shape of a dominant masculinity, which presides over both knowledge and poetry (commodities Barrett Browning was eager to possess). The encouraging Maecenas who is Moulton-Barrett is, in Aurora Leigh, transformed into the sets of secret knowledge hidden from Aurora the poet. Poetry changes from being sanctioned by the father in Barrett Browning’s earlier writing, to become an intellectual experience which has to be secretly wrested from closed packing cases, significantly placed in the deliberately poetically clichéd garret-room, and labelled paternally.

Elizabeth Barrett’s early life was then deeply affected by this series of relationships with men, all of which were vitally important to her intellectual development, but all of which were also deeply unsatisfactory. Her relationship with the elderly Boyd gave her a knowledge of and almost an awe for classicism (an influence apparent in ‘To My Father on His Birthday’), while her affection for ‘Bro’ was certainly intellectually vital and at times passionate. And her relationships with these men forced a focus on what became a central concern for her poetry later: the problem of the apparent necessity to address her poetry at least partially to men. Aurora Leigh and Sonnets from the Portuguese explore this difficulty, both in terms of poetic form and in their interwoven narratives and contemplations. Negotiating her position as a female poet with these paternal and masculine influences led in two directions; in personal terms, Barrett Browning’s reaction was to shut herself off from any event which might earn the ‘disapprobation’ of her father (until, that is, she met Robert Browning).

In poetic terms, Barrett Browning was faced with the dilemma forced upon the female poet by an apparent lack of satisfactory predecessors and the pressure to write, for the sake of acceptance, in recognised ‘male’ forms. The method Sonnets from the Portuguese employs to overcome these difficulties of audience, influence and the charge of being ‘lightweight’, is one partially embodied in the dramatic monologue form used by both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; masks, adopted personae and pretences are used to open new perspectives and at times to call the bluff of standard practices. The Sonnets are both deliberately authorless (or authoressless) and not ‘from the Portuguese’, and so are doubly removed from the direct engagement of the female poet with the extended analysis of passion which the Sonnets undertake.

Barrett Browning also skilfully employs standard poetic forms (blank verse and, at times, the epic) in Aurora Leigh, a poem which addresses its own form and its relationship to ‘male’ epic forms, and which is written in assured and subtle iambic pentameters, yet which also cuttingly addresses major social issues (rape and prostitution, for example). Aurora Leigh is remarkable enough for its narrative abilities, but as feminist critics have hinted at and in places examined, Aurora Leigh also involves complexly evolving attempts to create forms of poetic expression apt to the woman poet, forms which are capable of addressing the pressures of masculinity on poetry and the need for any ‘difference’ in female poetic expression. As an example of this one can take the opening of the ‘Fifth Book’, with the paragraph beginning:

Aurora Leigh, be humble. Shall I hope
To speak my poems in mysterious tune
With man and nature? – with the lava-lymph …

Here the often repeated ‘Aurora Leigh, be humble’ signals the beginning of a contemplation of the new and the unsettled; this phrase is used constantly in the poem to mark both the extent to which Aurora feels awkward in assuming her role as a thinker and the ability she has to retrace her thoughts and revise what she uncovers. The sentence which follows is one of the most tortuous in the poem, made up of a series of clauses each reformulating and asking a parallel question to ‘Shall I hope/ To speak my poems in mysterious tune/ With man and nature?’, a set of questions which are then restated in ‘can I speak my verse’. The sentence is finally brought to a conclusion at line 445 (in this edition) and like the end of a parenthesis is enclosed by the repeated (though more positively expressed) phrase ‘Go,/ Aurora Leigh: be humble.’ This grammatical awkwardness and difficulty is no accident. The series of clauses which make up the bulk of the sentence may be grammatically parallel, but they build on each other for specific effects. Take, for example, the lines:

With spring’s delicious trouble in the ground,
Tormented by the quickened blood of roots,
And softly pricked by golden crocus sheaves
In token of the harvest-time of flowers?

The question here is explicitly about the ‘mysterious tune’ which the female poet must write in; the harmony which she needs to achieve between ‘nature’ and ‘man’ (a term used ironically here – is it male or human?). In putting together this fundamental question about whether women’s poetry is possible, Aurora begins to show that it is. Standard poetic images of spring are celebratory (both the opening of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ are sources here); Aurora’s rendition of spring adds a different dimension: ‘delicious trouble’ appears to be in ‘mysterious tune’ with nature, so that the regeneration of spring is close to pregnancy and childbirth, involving pain and ecstasy. The notion of spring as regenerative and reproductive, yet close to the feminine, is repeated by images of menstruation in ‘Tormented by the quickened blood of roots’ and loss of virginity in ‘softly pricked by the crocus-sheaves’. This feminised revision of staid poetic imagery culminates in the extraordinary lines:

… with all that strain
Of sexual passion, which devours the flesh
In a sacrament of souls? with mother’s breasts
Which, round the new-made creatures hanging there,
Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres?

Here the standard poetic image (the usually metaphysical ‘spheres’ which represent the universe and its harmonies in totality) is made radically female, a process which the previous revision of spring prepared the reader for. Such is the remarkable detail, care and vigour with which Barrett Browning writes.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry embodies ideas and energies which exceed the capacities of any single reading. Any reader of Barrett Browning is confronted with a poet who writes (often selfconsciously) in an intellectual way, exploring and creating ‘neologisms’ (as Aurora calls new thinking) within carefully and skilfully crafted verse forms. The combination of poetic technique, energy and ideas becomes an interdependent relationship in her writing, and makes Barrett Browning one of the most challenging and rewarding Victorian poets.

COLIN GRAHAM